Tim Tyson Coming

The Haywood County NAACP and Junaluskan Book Review is sponsoring a presentation by Dr. Tim Tyson, professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture at Duke Divinity School and author of the bookBlood Done Sign My Name, which deals with the killing of a 23-year old black Vietnam vet by whites in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970. The book explores white supremacy and the racial history of North Carolina through a narrative that weaves together not only the story of the murder, the acquittal of the accused white men by an all-white jury and its aftermath, but also Tyson's own family's story. (Tyson's father was the minister of the First United Methodist Church in Oxford at the time of the murder and was ultimately run out of the church for supporting civil rights.) Blood Done Sign My Name won the Southern Book Award in 2005, the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and has been adapted into a play as well as a movie which was filmed in North Carolina and released in 2010.